Living with combat stress
On the eve of my husband’s return from a year-long deployment in southern Afghanistan a couple months ago, a friend who is also a military spouse told me everyone returns from deployment changed. And the at-home spouses are changed by the experience, too. Some of it is permanent. And some of it is bad.
I thought immediately of the ever-present anxiety I had lived with since he left last March. Would that anxiety be permanent? Could my body ever forget the nowtoo-familiar stress hormones pulsing through it? And what would be the change in my husband?
Over the course of this deployment, my husband and I supported each other to the best of our abilities. This meant, in part, shielding each other from daily stress. I knew I was only hearing the parts he was willing to expose me to, protecting me from what I didn’t have to know.
I did the same because he needed to focus on his job and staying safe without worrying about me and our three children. But that also meant bearing much of our difficulties alone, which is not easy for a couple like us who have always shared our worries and relied on each other to get through stressful times.
As details have emerged about Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in the quiet night — many of them women and children — our concerns have only deepened. He was on his fourth combat deployment in nine years; there were financial hardships, a traumatic brain injury, wounds from prior deployments, and the recent trauma of seeing a friend’s leg blown off just the day before.
Stereotyping gets it wrong
Yet these stresses, sadly, are not unusual for our combat troops and their families — the small minority of Americans who have shouldered the effects of more than 10 years of war. And that makes this particular atrocity that much more difficult for the military community. The image of the veteran as a ticking time bomb threatens true understanding of the veterans who have fought with honor and amazing resiliency. His is not a narrative of the 2.4 million men and women who have proudly, quietly served this country in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their millions more children and spouses.
Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had a different experience from veterans of other wars, and we might not yet appreciate all the implications. They have served longer and more frequent deployments, with 43% serving more than
Servicemembers and families who bear the strains of multiple deployments are hurt by news media depictions of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales
once and 17% serving three or more tours, according to 2011 Department of Defense data. Some 13% have served a combat tour lasting one year or longer.
Not surprisingly, with each successive deployment, the likelihood of having mental health issues increases. In a 2010 military survey, soldiers serving their third or fourth tours in Afghanistan were more than twice as likely as those on their first tour to exhibit screening criteria for acute stress, depression or anxiety, and more than three times as likely to use prescription mental health medications.
The effects of a servicemember’s deployment also impact the family left behind. According to a 2010 study published in the journal Pediatrics, children ages 3 to 8 whose parents are deployed have increased mental and behavioral health visits, with a 19% increase in behavior disorders and an 18% increase in stress disorders, compared with those whose military parents were not deployed. Adolescents of deployed military parents have higher heart rates and blood pressure.
Stress of single parenting
Stress on children also spills over from civilian spouses who must adapt to life as a functional single parent while their loved ones are in harm’s way. Civilian women whose husbands are deployed are almost twice as likely to abuse a child physically and four times as likely to neglect a child as civilian women with military husbands at home.
Similarly, spouses of deployed troops are at increased risk of receiving a mental health diagnosis, a risk that increases with the length of the deployment.
Changed, but stronger
The seldom told story is the one of the soldier who serves multiple deployments and comes out changed but stronger. Those are the families who steadfastly support their loved ones amid household upheaval created by the deployment, and yet grow in their love and deepen their perspective on life.
We seem to hear only about the scandals. The embarrassments. The egregiously broken. This serves only to deepen the chasm between civilian and military life, a direction that cannot be healthy for the future of America.
It has been eight weeks since I welcomed home my husband at Camp LeJeune. It’s too early to tell how we’ve permanently changed as a result of this deployment, but I’m optimistic. We’ve never been closer as a family. We’ve grown in our faith. We place new value of all living under the same roof. We’ve made it through, and in that process, joined the countless military families who soldier on after a combat deployment, quietly, next door.